SOURCE: "The Author Is Too Much with Us," in Commonweal, Vol. CXXIII, No. 3, February 9, 1996, pp. 22-3.

In the following review, Maitland suggests that The Moor's Last Sigh suffers from the fallout of the fatwa imposed upon its author.

Salman Rushdie is—and I think this can be said fairly uncontroversially—one of the most important English-language novelists currently writing. He has mythologized all our lives, and done so in the arena of multiculturalism and postmodernism. This is a remarkable achievement; and of course cannot be separated, in some important respects, from his own social boundary transgressions—he is the product of both a divided India and the British Public School system: Gandhi and Tom Brown's School Days; of Islam and the Booker Prize. Autobiography however is not the whole story—Rushdie has an extraordinarily bold imagination, in relation to both subject matter and plot and to language—as...